Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

“Fine. I’ll watch it one day.”

“No, you should see it now.”

“I’m pretty beat, but go ahead.”

Chloe hit the button to download the movie. She settled back into the cushions, holding the plate up close to her chin so she wouldn’t drop crust crumbs or tomato sauce on herself. She downed two of the three slices, put the plate back on the table, and worked on her beer.

“My God, it’s so clear you can see right up Meryl Streep’s nose,” Chloe said.

About half an hour into the movie, Miles said, “This is really good.”

Chloe said nothing.

As Miles turned to see why she’d not responded, her head slowly drifted toward him until it came to rest on his shoulder. He carefully pried the half-empty beer can from her fingers, set it on the wide leather arm of the couch, then took the remote from Chloe’s lap and muted the movie.

He listened to her soft, sleepy breathing, felt the warmth of her next to him.

When he’d made the decision to go looking for his biological children, it had been because he believed it to be the right thing to do. He felt he owed them something — a future. Accepting that his own was limited, it felt appropriate to make a better one for those he was leaving behind.

What he hadn’t anticipated was this. That he would forge a connection.

That he would find someone he could very possibly care about.

A daughter.

And there were others out there. Not as many as he’d originally come to believe, but there were others. Three unaccounted for — Todd Cox and Katie Gleave and Jason Hamlin — but, so far, according to Dorian, none of the others on his list — Nina Allman, Colin Neaseman, Barbara Redmond, Travis Roben, Dixon Hawley — had met with misadventure.

That said, he felt an urgency to find them. But at least, for now, he’d found one.

He rested his head against Chloe’s and, despite all the turmoil of the last couple of weeks, felt, at least in this moment, a sense of contentment. No, it was more than that. It was a sense of closeness.

As he allowed his eyelids to shut, as he permitted himself to let go and fall into a much-needed sleep, a thought came to him:

This is good.

And, even more incredibly:

I’m happy.

Scottsdale, AZ

Dixon Hawley turned out to be, as the saying goes, a piece of cake.

Rhys and Kendra followed him after he finished closing up the art gallery where he worked late one evening. Dixon didn’t have a car, and he lived close enough to his job that he walked to and from work. He did not, like many his age, live at home with his parents, but in a small apartment complex. Yes, there would be some cleaning involved, as any attempt to set his residence on fire was going to be met with limited success. The building was equipped with automatic sprinklers and only a couple of blocks from the closest fire station.

But for the most part, everything was going their way on this one.

To reach the entrance to his apartment building, Dixon had to walk down a narrow, dimly lit passageway lined with vines and bushes. At one end was the street; in the middle, the entrance to the building; and at the other end, the parking lot.

He was almost to the door, had the key in his hand, when Kendra, who was near the end by the parking lot, called out to him.

“Excuse me?”

Dixon stopped, looked, and said, “Yes?”

“Do you live here?”

“Yeah?”

“Okay, so, I’m visiting, and I was backing out, and I hit someone’s car and I wonder if you know whose it is.”

“Won’t be mine,” he said. “I don’t have a car.”

“If you know whose it is, I can see if I can find them in the building, give them my name and number.”

Dixon smiled. How often did you meet people that honest?

So he tucked his key back into his pocket and walked to the end of the passageway, where Rhys was hiding behind a bush with a landscape rock in his hand, which he brought crashing down on poor Dixon Hawley’s head.

They quickly bundled him into a body bag and then into the back of their rented van, where Rhys whomped Dixon one more time on the head, through the bag, just to be sure. They closed and locked the van and then, with Hawley’s key, let themselves into the building, bringing along several empty garbage bags and cleaning materials, including, of course, the bleach.

Aware that the building had security cameras, they both wore ball caps with large visors and kept their heads down as they made their way.

“Oh, I love this guy,” Kendra said upon entering the young man’s second-floor apartment. “He’s a neat freak.”

It was true. The unit was small but immaculate. The stainless steel kitchen sink was empty, and glistening. The dishwasher was empty, all the dishes and glasses put away. The bathroom, even before they’d broken out the cleaning kit, smelled of Lysol. A single toothbrush stood propped up in a crystal clear glass. Not that they still didn’t have their work cut out for them. Bagging the man’s clothes, his bedding, toiletries. Hairs removed from bathroom drains, then drain cleaner poured in for good measure. Surfaces Dixon was most likely to have touched were wiped down with bleach. Kendra ran through with a vacuum, emptied its contents into the garbage bag. And even though the glasses and dishes were clean, Dixon would have touched them when he emptied the dishwasher, so Rhys put them all back into the machine and set it to run.

What they were doing, of course, was not foolproof. Their employer had told them to do the best they could, and that was what they set out to do.

This time they remembered to make sure they had Dixon’s phone — it was with him, in his pocket, in the body bag out in the van. And they bagged the laptop that was sitting on the coffee table in the living room, even the remotes lined up in front of the TV.

You did what you could.

The apartment had a small balcony that overlooked the parking area, so when they were done, Rhys went outside and collected the garbage bags as Kendra dumped them over the railing.

Then all that was left was to drive out in the desert, find a nice, secluded spot away from the main road, bring out the body bag, soak it with unleaded, and put a match to it.

The following morning, they were on a plane headed for Fort Wayne.

Now, standing in the bowling alley, they assessed the situation.

They’d been following Travis Roben around for the better part of a day and had concluded this one was going to be more difficult than Dixon Hawley. The young man lived at home with his parents — always more problematic when there were other people on the scene — and when he wasn’t at home he was in the company of this blond chick.

This was looking more and more like a collateral damage situation. To get to Roben, they were going to have to risk exposing themselves to the girl. So they might have to take her out, too. At least, where she was concerned, there was not the added business of cleanup. So what if her body was found? So what if someone got her toothbrush or extricated some hairs from her shower drain? Their client was not concerned about any DNA test on her. They had concluded, on the flight to Phoenix, that the mandated cleanups were to erase DNA evidence, although they still had no idea why that mattered.

Kendra said, “She’s gonna do him.”

Rhys was skeptical. “What are you talking about? You got some sort of sixth sense? You a student of body language?”

“I can read lips,” she said. “She just asked him if he wanted to do it. I can’t tell you what he said because his back’s to me.”

“I can tell you what he said. He said yes.”

“Oh. Do you have some sort of sixth sense? Are you a student of body language?”